Just the idea of development throws me off. Is Development the possibility of choice? Where a person can choose the quality of life they want and be able to obtain it. Or what does it actually mean to have an industry (and it is an industry) geared toward ‘developing’ people? Well obviously the first observation to make is that the people who are to developed are invariably poor and black and located in so-called third-world countries. The question then obviously is to ask, well how did they get that way in the first place? The answer to that will lead one to notice that the same locations and countries who were responsible for those “poor black people” being in that condition are now the ones who have taken it upon themselves to “develop” those ‘poor black people”. There is now a well-established scholarship that says that development itself is a neo-colonial practice. Authors like Escobar (1995) or Long (2001) would say that development is a discourse which permanently frames those people in villages or urban centers of squalor or townships in a state of being behind the evolutionary curve (Europe and the “developed Nations” are then in contrast more evolved by some natural coincidence).
In thinking about development as a discourse it is hard to ‘get out’ of these harmful distinctions when trying working within that framework. In other words it is a powerful set of words and concepts all linked together in what Stuart Hall called a constellation of ideas, which has people like us often having to debate what is better or worse ways of developing people, when in fact there is no room to challenge the assumptions, omissions and the violence that is inherent in the idea of development itself. Assumptions such as the idea that industrialization is the natural direction all civilized societies must go. Omissions such as the fact that suffering among the targets of development aid schemes is a direct result of historical events like slavery and colonialism. And the violence which is done to people by categorizing them as undeveloped. That is why a book like Walter Rodney’s (third world hero) ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’ has been so important in this debate.
In his paper Escobar, goes back to the very first time the idea of developing Africa was use in the international conversation. It was an American President (I think Roosevelt at a UN speech in the 50s) where from that moment on, Africa was locked into this position of needing Aid from the first world. This mobilized massively powerful machinery for accessing communities on the continent.
The question I have, is there a space to challenge development as a discourse? What if I do not want to define development because its a discourse I don't believe in?
It was Truman.
Posted by: S2 | October 31, 2009 at 03:11 PM